Vinnie looked her over. She was colossally huge, crazily powerful, treacherous, grisly, and fanged, but she was kind of growing on him. A flash burst out of him, involuntarily lighting the leaf surface.
"We have chemistry," he admitted. "Frankly, I'm tempted."
"Well, what's stopping you?"
He drew a breath. "I've got a counter-proposal. Why don't you let me go? Then, as a reward, I'll send you three or four other Photinus males to make up for the loss of me."
"Would you really do that? Why?"
"I've got my reasons. It just so happens that certain flyers are aesthetically offensive. Those guys are unfit, and they shouldn't be reproducing. Seriously."
"I'm supposed to eat rivals whose work isn't up to your artistic standards?"
"Have you seen those clowns by the bramble pile? Every night they fly those tight little circles …"
She laughed. "You mean them? They're the shallow end of the gene pool! They couldn't tell my sophisticated repartee from some dirty come-on! They're beneath me."
"You're not being reasonable here. Do you want someone to appreciate your charm, or do you want food?"
She pulled in irritation at her soiled wing. It peeled free from the nettle's furry surface. "What's your name, anyway?"
"Vinnie."
"I'm Dolores."
"Hi."
"I've heard stories about situations like this," she said slowly. "Once I heard about a sister who actually fell for a Photinus guy."
"No kidding."
"He was so sweet that she just chewed his two midlegs off. Because she wanted him to fly off and reproduce and put more men like himself into the breeding population."
"That's a great evolutionary gambit, but I don't want my legs eaten off," Vinnie said. He lost his composure and began to flash uncontrollably.
"You should watch it, carrying on that way," she said. Reflexively, she flashed in response. Her flashes were hugely powerful, torrents of carnivorous vitality. "A little guy like you, you could blow some valve in your abdomen."
"Does that matter, Dolores? Summer's going to end! I'll die of natural causes! Let me go. I'll creep on back to you at the end of my lifespan. You can eat me then! What difference does that make to either one of us?"
"I might die before you came back," she said. "I might starve to death."
"So what? So what if we both burn out tonight in one last great performance? You don't scare me."
She backed away. "You have guts and talent," she admitted. "You can glow."
"I thought I was hot stuff till I met you," he said. Light poured from him. Now they were duetting. She had a wild, feral, overwhelming gift for expression. It was like standing next to the sun.
The nettle leaf trembled gently. Another lightning bug had arrived.
He was long and spindly and thin. He was too tall, and his proportions were off.
"What have we got here?" he drawled.
"I'm Vinnie. This is Dolores. Now get lost."
The stranger looked at Dolores quizzically. "Why is this piece of meat talking?"
"You're a Photuris male," said Dolores in awe. "At last! Where have you been all my life?"
"I'm a rarity, babe, the only one in these parts. You and the suppertime here sure are making a big, bright ruckus. I never flew by this little nettle patch before, but you're hard to miss tonight. When do we eat?"
"Did you flash on your way here?" said Vinnie. "It would have been more polite to flash."
"Why would I bother? I know where she is." He turned to Dolores. "Would you kill him now, please? I'm hungry."
"Wait a minute," said Vinnie. "What flashing system do you use?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"It's a professional interest. She's a mimic, right? She mimics how a Photinus flashes. Are you a mimic too?"
"I can mimic fourteen different genres of flashing," said the stranger.
"Okay, fine, yeah, I get that, very impressive. You're great at pastiche. But I'm asking you: how do you yourself flash, as a Photuris? What do you bring to the table, creatively speaking?"
"Well," said the stranger, "with an incident like this one, I don't need to flash at all. I can just watch her mimicking you. Then we eat you, and we reproduce, and everything's hunky-dory."
Vinnie turned to Dolores. "You know what? This creep can't flash for himself. He's got nothing authentic to say!"
"Is that true?" said Dolores.
With a groan of disbelief, the stranger lit up. "Okay, fine, be that way! You want a guy to flash at you, no problem, I can ripple through all kinds of patterns. You name it, I can do it. Whatever the market demands."
"That's not his point," said Dolores. "His point was, you can't communicate with me as a man of my own species should communicate with a woman."
"But we're carnivores! We exploit the flashing system in order to eat people who flash."
"Does this mean you're incapable of a sincere expression in your own idiom?"
"You need to knock those weird ideas out of your head," said the stranger. "So what I don't have a unique Photuris signal! Who cares? I don't need one, and I don't want one. I'll tell you what I do want and need—and you'd better give it to me. I want to eat his head and thorax. You can eat the rest of him, but leave those parts for me."
"Why?"
"Especially those big glands in his neck."
"Why is that?" she insisted.
"Because that's where he manufactures ‘lucibufagin,' the firefly poison. Once we eat those poison glands, we absorb the poison. Then we become poisonous too."
"We're not poisonous by nature?" said Dolores.
"No. Not until we eat Photinus beetles. See, we have no need to create our own poison. We just suck poison out of their flesh, and then it belongs to us."
"Okay, that does it!" Vinnie announced. "I was sympathetic to the situation up to this point, but that's just a plain rip-off! You've got no lightning pattern, and you've got no poison either? You're not a predator at all! You're a parasite!"
"Watch what you say," said the stranger. He shielded his eyes from Vinnie's angry flashing.
"You want a piece of me? Come on, give me your best shot!"
"Kill him," the stranger urged.
"She doesn't need any more poison," Vinnie pointed out, "because she already killed and ate six men. You're the one who's begging her to do your dirty work."
"Why am I listening to this?"
"What kind of man do you call yourself? You're a complete poseur! You're a drone."
The male Photuris took a cautious step back to the edge of the nettle leaf. "I'm far too valuable to risk my unique genes fighting prey animals."
"You don't like this?" said Vinnie. "You're shaking all over! Come back here and tussle, you lackluster, poison-free wimp!"
"You know what he's up to, don't you?" called the stranger to Dolores. "If I get injured, there could be any number of women in this area who go unfertilized. Including you!"
A black shape hurtled from nowhere with a sudden jarring collision. It was Peck. In an instant, Peck's jaws had crunched fatally through the stranger's back.
"Fly away!" Dolores screamed. In her panic, she failed to unfurl her gummy, delicate wings. Her heavy body collided with a dozen nettle leaves on her way to earth.
"Wow, he tastes fantastic!" Peck muttered through a mouthful of pierced integument. "I always knew that a lightning bug would taste great!"
Peck hauled the stranger's paralyzed carcass toward the smooth base of the leaf. "Ow! Why'd you have to pick a nettle plant, Vinnie?"
Vinnie left. With a few discreet flashes, he located Dolores. She was terrified and cowering under a wilting toadstool.
"What was that?" Dolores gasped.
"Jumping spider," said Vinnie. "Came out of nowhere and nailed him."
"What a horrible monster!"
"I've been around," said Vinnie. "They're all the same." He examined himself. His left midleg had frozen into position. One of Dolores's ante
nnae was wrecked and cockeyed. Both of them were smeared with gum and flecks of dirt. "Look how screwed up we are! Why'd you pick a nettle for a perch?"
Dolores loosened her enormous jaws. "That makes it harder for prey to get away."
"Well, we got away, anyway."
"Yes, but now I'm starving!"
One of the Photuris's legs came tumbling down. It stuck to the side of a fallen leaf. It was followed by the entirety of his severed, glowing gut. Vinnie limped forward and sniffed. "Spiders sure are picky eaters. This leg here is practically whole."
"You can't eat that," she said.
"Are you kidding? Sure I can eat it."
"Well, save some for me!"
Vinnie reached out and sampled a bit of the broken, glowing abdomen. "You know what this is? This is practically pure luciferin! And that tangy spice is its catalyst, luciferase!" He stuck his entire head into his rival's exploded gut. It was as if the core of the sun had been made out of jam: yellow, rich, and thick.
Vinnie pulled himself free, and for, the first time in his life, he glowed from both ends. When he swallowed, he glowed so hard that light shone through his thorax.
"You shouldn't eat that stuff."
"What, like I can't metabolize my own biochemistry? You go ahead and eat his leg! Go on, chow down, you've got the fangs for it!" Vinnie opened his wing-cases. His back glowed straight through the veining of his wings. He glittered all over. It felt completely sublime.
"I couldn't possibly eat my own species," Dolores said primly.
"Oh, come on, I won't tell! I bet I'm the first Photinus to devour a Photuris in about a million years." Vinnie burrowed right in and began to glut himself. "I haven't had a serious meal in ages! This is giving me my appetite back!"
"I've lost my best perch. I'm going to starve," said Dolores, bursting into sobs. "I'll never reproduce. I'm an evolutionary failure!"
"Quit fussing," shrugged Vinnie, wiping bright goo from his jaws. "I did my own bit for posterity. So what? It's not like we ever live to see posterity." He groomed his damaged leg, licking his own seeping juices. Maybe he would heal, if he swallowed enough protein. Fireflies were quick to heal.
"I'm totally disillusioned, Vinnie. Because I now know that there can be no true sincerity between a woman and a man. We can never have a genuine meeting of minds. Language fails us."
Suddenly Vinnie disgorged. "Oh, dear. Oh, that was just too rich to keep down."
Dolores examined the brightly glowing pile of masticated paste.
"That's interesting … Now that you ate this and barfed it up, it smells just like a Photinus smells."
"Sure. We're all the same chemistry under the skin."
"It even tastes like you taste. It tastes pretty good, actually."
"I told you it was terrific." Vinnie burst into triumphant laughter. "Look at me now! Look! I'm glowing fore and aft, port and starboard, inside and out! I have achieved the height of artistry! This is the happiest night of my life!"
Dolores dabbled her cruelly hooked feet in the glowing paste. In a mix of despair and frivolity, she anointed herself with gold. It made her gorgeous, splendid, luminous. She was terrible and beautiful, like a flaming angel.
Clarity flooded his mind. "I love you! Let's fly till dawn!"
FB2 document info
Document ID: 99322bb1-6bf7-1014-8eae-a2edef2ff72a
Document version: 1
Document creation date: 02.06.2008
Created using: Text2FB2 software
Document authors :
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Luciferase Page 2
